Burdens
by Cattivo
Summary: A small oneshot excercise.  Sometimes gravity can be a terrible thing, especially when one abuses it.  And especially when one pays for it.


Burdens

A Little Saw 'short' by Zri Kolsen

Note: I promised myself over and over that if I ever wrote a Saw fic, it wouldn't be a Trap Fic. 9.9; Well, way to adhere, me. (claps) Anyway, this is probably an excercise to prove to myself that I can write violence and gore, and at least do so meaningfully, more than anything. (coughs) u.u; But anyway, I also wanted to say that if someone here has written a trap like this, you'll just have to trust me when I say I didn't mean to steal it. 9.9;; It's a little unrealistic to expect me to keep up with every trap that's been submitted to this section, don't you think? So if this trap is similar to any other, or to your idea, that's completely coincidental. This is just something I kinda spun out, and gnawed at me until I finished it, so there you go. XD; Nothing too incriminating, right?

Disclaimer of Special!! - ...You know, as funny as it would be, the notion of Saw's directors or whoever writing fanfiction for their own creation is highly improbably. 8D;; So you can just rest assured I do not own Saw, yeah?

**Burdens**

* * *

Though he had been conscious for at least half an hour, it still took ten minutes for his mind to reel back from the blurs and soft rhythmic thunder that whirled in his head, thunder that turned out to be the drip of water from grungy iron pipes in the ceiling. It was dark, and without a doubt it was an umbrage that consequently sent sounds crashing inside his throbbing head as he tried to calculate everything fading in around him. If it wasn't his surroundings that warned him from the outset that he had woken up anywhere but home, it was the fact that his arms and legs had been torn into a less than delicate spread eagle position around him. There was this suppression, and the suffocating shudder he gave atop the feeling of a smooth and frozen surface beneath him. There was this, and what he felt to be an augural steel slate with his clothes tattered and damp, providing no protection against the chill of gloom as the darkness bled into light like dark ink to water. In short and without awkwardness, he had no idea, nor any true way of knowing just where the fuck he was. 

And it was attempting to move his arms that sent the most unbearable agony imaginable bolting directly into him. There was a vague soreness to begin with upon awakening, but moving sent it swelling from his limbs and closing like cloth around his pounding body, almost to a point that he nearly felt it externalize and suffocate him.

"Help!! What the fuck is this?! _Somebody help me, anyone!!_"

He screamed, he was boisterous and magnificent in how he screamed, howling like a damned soul before glimpsing Hell as the minotaur's tail ensnared his sins. But thrashing his legs only brought him worse, like something cold and metal inside him shredding steaks from the muscles and splintering the bones. Agony, agony, agony. He screamed for a good solid ten minutes, a deafening block of sound as he struggled five minutes and cried in defeat another five. Perhaps it was the pain itself that finally forced him still for once, or perhaps he stopped the moment he noticed the large iron stakes effectively crucifying his palms, his thighs and the achilles tendon lining the back of his heels.

Hard to tell.

A morbid part of him grew immensely satisfied at the defeat of suppression as he lied there and let that spiraling cold agony retreat back to its pinned sources. It coiled around his new wounds like serpents, rippling into his chest only slightly, circling restlessly around the iron stakes as if delighting in the wicked notion to be baited again by movement. He panted, clearly beyond tears. His fists clenched and drew the venom of the serpents into his shaking fingers as they slowly unfurled, that defiance faded almost as suddenly as he had claimed it. There was now nothing boisterous or defiant or assertive about him, a man nailed down to a steel table staring up into a steel ceiling surrounded by rust flecked pipes and bleeding dark. He could only receive.

And that seemed the exact hope of the little T.V set nestled comfortably atop a smaller steel table to his right, as it began to flicker and roar to life, turning his head with promise of life beside him. In fear and in suffering, the man had no inclination to do anything else other than offer the closest attention that he had ever seldom paid in his entire life. Even if he found himself staring into the grungy, speckled and painted face of a turning doll's head, nothing about his situation called for scoffing.

Its cheeks were painted into laughing little red spirals, lips smeared into a cheery smirk, its white plastic complexion fetching back memories of his own life with its obvious reference to childhood. But what cast his breathing ragged were the coal black eyes, sporting irises the color of dried blood that pierced all the innocence the puppet had, drawing around itself now something sinister and calculating. Something dark. And with its flapping, mechanical little jaw, the puppet began speaking to him, though not in a voice suitable for any puppet he had seen in his past.

"Hello, Gregory."

The circling pain sent warning into him before he could try to get up again, if even to run away from its voice. Whether it was the scream of pain or fear that he bit inside, drawing blood from his bottom lip, again it was hard to tell. His breathing became uneven and heavy, his heart slamming in and out of his chest. His crucified limbs roared furiously in their annoyance as a cold, sick sweat began matting dark hair hanging into his clammy and feverishly warm brow.

"For as long as I have watched you, you seem rather content in life, without anything to work for. You have held in your hands things that others around you may only dream of. And yet you've left it all. Your education, your parents, your home, your wife, your children, your reasonable, steady paying job."

A very damp core welding his flesh and lung began clamping around his stomach, embarrassment and the suffering overtaking him. His thin and pale lips parted to reveal now chattering teeth that nearly cracked from how shaken he was slowly becoming, as the puppet trickled his darkest secrets so casually.

"And yet your reckless tendencies seem to remain the fault of everyone around you. Strange, that it's never the fault of the _true culprit_. ...Was it really the fault of everyone around you that you've left and given up on everything, or did you just want to shy away from true responsibility? You're going to show me, right now."

The core inside of him nearly erupted from his mouth as he felt a fiery swelter rise in his throat. As his breath flew harshly from his nostrils his hands tried desperately to clench only to annoy his palms, his teeth clenched together to cage the furious screams now flying like bullets in his skull. What? What would he be showing him right then? What would this visage do, knowing his wrongs and his sins? What? _What?_ Where he was had faded far from Gregory's mind, his eyes wanting nothing more than to dart their gaze in the darkness and identify an attacker, someone waiting, an end coming. His hands trembled violently with the desire to bolt for the nearest wall, away from this exposure as shame took residence alongside all the questions and sinking in his bones.

"As you have certainly noticed, you are bolted down to this table."

Yeah, no shit there, Sherlock. "The stakes are straight, without the twists and turns you claim your life to have. Hurry up and climb off the table if you want to save yourself, and the person in the next room, who currently has an active poison coursing through their body. Just be wary of your surroundings, and the people around you. That alone can make the difference, for every midnight you've spent drunk in your own grandeur.

"His eyes widened as there suddenly came the brusque clank of machinery, chains, directly above him from behind the steel ceiling. His breath caught into his throat, growing wilder as the sweat began to bead wildly on his forehead, his eyes unable to resist staring directly into the ceiling as he could have sworn that it wavered...

"Just hurry to save yourself. Or else all the burdens and blame that you have for so long crushed those around you with, may come back to break you in the end. Live or die, Gregory. Make your choice."

The television flickered off.

There came the winding clank of muffled machinery, and his heart writhed in his drying throat as the creak accompanied the grind of steel, and he watched the grate in the ceiling slowly begin to hover downward. It became much more solid and large as it clattered and stilled, only to begin clanking downward again, a thick and bolted block of aging metal that hung methodically from thick heavy chains, or so he assumed. And each stalling of old axels and weighted gears ate the seconds he had left.

He screamed and howled again so beautifully in defeat, his fate wilder and brighter to him than the pristine foams of the Atlantic Ocean crashing on jagged coves, his defeat more apparent to him than the caked and dried blood around his freshly trickling wounds as the agony came provoked and wretched. His voice barely rose over the old mechanisms, but he screamed until his throat gave way, unable to understand. Unable to understand how walking home from the bar could have given him any sort of warning that it would come to this. Unable to understand how his favorite colors, blue, dark green and black could have ever marked him for such vicious retribution. Unable to understand how his favorite bands, Kansas, ACDC and Journey could have ever given him foreboding messages of what was to come. Unable to understand how realizing he just wasn't cut out for high school, that he had only married his wife in desperation to escape the feelings of solitude, that his children meant nothing to him in a family bound only by pressure, could have ever equated to a dark room and waiting to be smothered by a tottering weight. Who could say. Who could say, indeed.

The spattered clamor and splintering calamity erupting around his steel table were all that waited to answer him. The weight was halfway down now, pausing and stilling its motions like a spider dangling from a strand in its web in the corner of a dark awning, gathering an almost predatory momentum to finish him off. Gravity, and the fragility of his bones would accomplish its mission without resistance.And that was why it happened. That was why he began fighting to tear himself away from the terrible gravity of his crucifixion. It may be known that it was not concern for this other prisoner that drove him, but rather it was his own desire to escape, to possibly exact terrible vengeance on his captor that gave him enough courage to begin pulling his right hand off its iron stave. In any case, Gregory had been brimmed with new desires now, that unless he truly wanted death would not and could not be denied.

It seemed so cliched to him, but all he could do was scream in a torn fury. The delicious friction of his slow motions nearly made him convulse as he fought to pull his arm upward, sliding the picket through his own flesh, and around desperately pumping vein. The bone practically cracked like firewood as it rode the smooth surface inside him, lifting upward and like the weight looming over, stilling as the glacial sting hurled icy fire into his body. The flesh on the other side of his hand was left tacked in place on the steel surface, shredding it from him, the open exposure of his wound and the fresh blood to the air sending white lights congregating and dancing in front of his eyes. The sound of cracking and the wet rip of skin deafened him almost as much as the machinery.

"**_Fuck!!_**"

It was shaking horribly, and the severed nerves sent his middle and index fingers twitching and curling uncontrollably, but his hand had been freed. With the smear and smudge of blood from his newly skinned hand tumbling down the surface, he set to work with his other hand, paying thousands of prayers simultaneously to whatever God might have heard him in this place that perhaps the pain would lessen, as natural highs and the effects of drugs eroded over time.

God apparently didn't like him very much, if at all. As he pulled his left hand free, he found it entirely limp and hanging off his wrist; he was likely to lose the damned thing. The weight clamored down from another stall, it hung five feet above him with menacingly slow velocity. He sat up with barely a breath left in him, the tears now free and sliding down a hollow face and high cheekbones as his legs quivered with depraved anticipation. His faded jeans were beginning to absorb the color of his shade, and now that he was halfway free, the affliction was more horrifying than ever. He was nearly exhausted by the exertion, but he would be damned if the clatter above him didn't remind him that still he had such a long way before he could rest.

His kneecap trembled hesitantly before he began trying to bend his right leg to free himself. He shrieked raggedly as the stave in his tendon ate into the bone of his heel and sent his leg slamming flat where it was, his mouth practically ripped open and crying silently with his eyes clenched shut in broken horror. He sent his head slamming harshly into the steel beneath him, if only to try and forget the misery now crippling his right side.

"_Fuck!! **Someone help me!!**_ "

He sat up desperately, panting through cracking, thin white teeth as he planted trembling fingers beneath his thigh, pulled upward and plunged the length of cold steel into his muscle. As the feeling of all his bulk and tendons twisting into knots inside his thigh sent the serpents raging and crushing him in coils, he only raged and cussed and was quick to tear his ankle free. His leg collapsed dead and unmoving beneath him, the muscle contracting and his jeans darkening. The burning of hell's fire tightening in his chest, and the senselessness that it flung him into nearly made him believe that this had to be a dream. That's what it was, it sure as fuck couldn't be real. It was all a dream, and soon he would wake up as the paling glided into and out of his left leg and laugh. He would laugh, he would laugh, and laugh and laugh and laugh and not give a shit anymore about anything.

He shredded his left ankle into freedom, and the nightmare didn't stop. As he lied there free of his crucifixion, there came a brief moment where he did not dedicate himself to his mission. In fact he devoted what felt like a solemn century lying there as blood pooled around him, losing himself in the newfound and old-fangled emptiness of having obtained some ultimate acquisition. He watched that block of steel falter with an archaic dread he had once known what felt so long ago. Gregory's head swam as if water swirled inside him and drowned the bullets, and had he not felt so... ...obsolete lying in the presence of death willingly, still like a damp husk, he would have laughed.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, _fuck_..."

The weight seemed so much farther now, an obstacle of the past that stalled and became still where he, a man desiring his freedom, had moved and overcome. It practically spat the superiority of humanity to the lowly machine, executing only orders and nothing more beyond the will of its master. Its master who had willed it to finish and silence him, assuming that he had no will and no strength left to fight his little game...He lied there in a crumpled heap with everything inside him limp, his face paling fast and teeth chattering beneath nervously smiling lips. He lied there transfixed with his accomplishment, his wounds yawned open again, blood came curling out and flexed warm spiraled paths over the metal edges and tumbled off to the unknown somewhere. He watched the patterns smudge into obscurity beneath his twitching hands with intrigue, so many questions regarding gravity rising like dust in his head.

The pain hardly seemed existent anymore, when he lied there and delivered his smugness to the four persecuting and now empty stakes rising in flesh tattered blurs around him. He turned his head to the side, a drunken and serpentine smile winding on him as he planted a bare elbow beneath him and flipped himself heavily onto his stomach, sliding and easing himself gently to the edge. The weight above him had stalled once more, though it was a close and just three feet above him its slow path to Earth had made his escape inevitable. There now just lied the matter of escaping this place, as his leg uselessly swung like a pendulum toward the concrete floor beneath him.

Cussing and the agony twinkling back into his consciousness, he eased his support onto his now useless left foot, with both arms and chest clinging desperately to the table. Gregory wasn't sure if he would be able to walk or not, though he had heard things regarding the Achilles tendon that it would be unwise to strain it.

"Goddamnit..."

Gregory's face twisted hideously, the cold and greasy beading sweat came trickling as his other leg clumsily toppled down beneath him, hanging lazily off to the side of his body like a broken dead branch. He rested there only a few seconds, both his legs stiffening as his muscles throbbed tortuous paths around sunken and cracked bones. The weight began its slow descent once more, and with his arms tightened he began to make a grander task of easing himself down onto his knees, though with his thighs impaled he knew he would be dragging himself by his elbows if anything. There was only so much terrible pain that a man could bear, if even it was for his own freedom. He had withstood already the absence of God's compassion more so than any being should witness in one night, one hour it seemed of struggling for his life, though he knew that given the distance of that weight and the table it was probably five minutes at most.

Though he had heard the clank of chains in the sinister mechanism above him, it never took its chance to register. The weight came toppling three feet down with all the full velocity that its mass could gather. He had only glanced upward once in quick panic before the weight came crashing down on top of his upper body. The crunch of bone, the unnatural melding of eyes and lips, of teeth and throat, jawbone and temple, of heart and lung was muffled elegantly by the falling block as steel met steel in a noisy clamor like a pair of clapping brass cymbals. There hadn't even been a time for a final, climatic scream as it might have suited a tortured hero before he divulged his life into death's favors. Just an erupting thunder, and then a faded, haunting silence as if still he hovered in this life, hanging by threads no man dared to reach for.

Gregory's legs never moved, nor did they lend onlookers any indication that they still had a master. They were motionless and quiet, the machines were stilled and the room was silent, the only movement being the thin tongues of blood that flickered from within the dark crevice of sandwiched metal.

And if only he had been wary of his surroundings as the puppet had warned him, if only he had taken every literal cruelty, he might have been so much more aware of the newly fashioned clock hanging off the wall to his right striking one minute past midnight. Though there was no true chance of it, upon closer inspection Gregory might also have been wary of the shimmering black lense peering directly from the center of the clock's blank and mechanical white face.

----

A tall creaking chair only sighed heavily at the carnage unfolding on a faint, glowing monitor. It turned on an equally noisy axis with all the boredom that could be expected of a dissatisfied movie goer, and from it there emerged a cloaked and slender owner that eased himself to his feet with an aged hand resting tiredly on top of the leathery arm. He had truly clung to some beacon of hope for the heedless specimen at rest in the other room. He just didn't understand it, as the knife on his table offered only an all too familiar wanton call for his hand that he reluctantly took in coiling fingers and tightening knuckles.

He just didn't understand it at all; he had been lying there free, watching the weight slowly come wavering down, he had _known_ all too well the danger he had been thrown into. He had to have, to withstand such torment. So just why, he asked silently, had he just lied there drunk in the begotten moment, smirking at death? Why had only half a victory suited him, until it had been too late to reach for something absolute?

Though he feigned confusion, if even for the sake of paying some contorted final respect to the now dead man in the other room, the answer was quite simple. Gregory had been just like every other test subject in his thus far scientific past. Arrogant, fumbling, assuming and with a cold disregard for the lesson painstakingly prepared for him with only selfish desire burning him onward. He had gained acquisition, and as all humans did now he had grown bored quickly with freedom when the peak of his labors was accomplished. Human nature. In summation, Gregory had been a perfect choice for testing, and it was more than apparent that his time had been due to come to an end. Another one that had foolishly taken life forgranted now, and though to outsiders it may have seemed a depraved sort of satisfaction, it was _his_ feeling nonetheless that another had merely earned what their selfish ways had prepared them for.

He silently ambled through the locked aperture, his cloak gliding blackly around his ankles as he lifted the young man's shirt and set to work to his side. The knife traced gentle curves and jagging angles, the point sinking all the more easily into Gregory while his flesh was still soft and susceptible to manipulation. It was bizarre to imagine for even a second that he enjoyed this particular part of his work; just who in their right mind wanted to hover around such savagery if not to fulfill a duty? His brow furrowed on the sight of the quickly pooling blood, his imagination ruthlessly wild and filling his head with possibilities of what could be left between the two steel slabs. He never said a word though, not one noise or complaint, though his disappointment practically permeated off of him with how piercingly his eyes fell on the sorry failure.

But all too quickly, his knife finished its deed. Delicately in black gloved fingers he lifted the diced skin and peeled it away, his gray and spattered T-shirt left up his backside and exposing the new mark quite on purpose.

There was nothing so extravagant left in his skin now as the cluttered holes in his arms and legs, though this newly cut wound was far more peculiar. There in Gregory's lower back, embellished by the shimmering color of blood and deep in his flesh he had sown in the shape of a jigsaw piece. The mark would blacken over time as the blood dried, the skin would decay around it and cave in the curves and angles, but as bright and abashing as Hester Prynne's letter there it remained. The stigma of subjects lacking and reckless, deserving of the fate they had been handed, undeserving of the life that they had been given.

He only turned and stalked away as the words came whirling through his cloaked mind, as words so often do. And with another heavy sigh, he couldn't stop them repeating, as clearly as he understood them.

_Most people are so **ungrateful**__, to be alive..._

**Game Over**

* * *

All righty, and that, as they say, is that. u.u;; My standard review policy regarding still applies here. Meaning that reviews aren't necessary, they're completely optional. u.u But any constructive criticism or attention is very highly appreciated! n.n And if you took the time to read this, review or not, I thank you very much for your time!! 

-Zri (10/11/07


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